Like Kissing Sunlight
by Jade Eclipse
Summary: She needs him so she can feel, and all he can do is burn for her. BuffySpike


Like Kissing Sunlight

I felt like going back to the root of it all. Much love to my reviewers for Lost, but I _miss_ the Buffyverse. And so here I am, with some short but angst-y Spike/Buffy vignette.

Summary: She needs him so she can feel, and all he can do is burn for her. Buffy/Spike.

Set sometime during the sixth season, but there's no specific time when. I tried to capture the absolute chaos of this relationship during this season (it lightened and became more gentle in the seventh), so forgive the rambling. I imagined that's what Spike's mindset would be- after all, his obsession with Buffy eventually drove him to such extremes as attempted rape.

This story reminds me of dark chocolate. Really, really dark chocolate, just with longer paragraphs and only the tiniest edge of sweetness.

Disclaimer Here 

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He knows he ought to hate her. Not only because she's the Slayer and he's a vampire, not only because she's everything he's not. Because it would be good for him. Loving her is like falling apart; she's like poison, she's like cigarettes. It's only a matter of time before she rips him apart from the inside and leaves him scattered all over the sidewalk, bits of flesh and blood and dust in the wind. And he knows all of this, but he can_not_ force himself to walk away. And he needs her, no matter how much it hurts, more than he needs nicotine or liquor or blood or the proverbial oxygen he doesn't need to breathe.

She has to realize how much he aches when he's with her. She's only there because she wants to feel, because she thinks she's so hollow and empty and he's something that's there to make her seem better, like chicken noodle soup or an old movie or a good joke (only nothing quite as quaint- Buffy's idea of better is to kill something, even if she denies it, so for her he would have to be a punching bag. An unliving, unbreathing creature that she treats like her own personal piñata). He's there because he makes her warm when he's next to her, if only because he's so ice cold. So he hates her for it, yes, because the words he said to her last year suddenly mean nothing. She doesn't make him feel like a man instead of a monster. She makes him feel like dirt, like something she would wrinkle her pretty little nose at if she found it stuck to the bottom of her shoe.

The hatred is good. It's vampiric and there's no danger for him in that. It's the other stuff (dare he classify it as love? She would pulverize him for even thinking it, and something makes him pause, no matter how many times he's proclaimed it before) that's bad. Because when she looks up at him with those sad eyes, whenever she's hurt or vulnerable or unhappy, all he wants to do is pull her into his arms and keep her there forever, kiss her temple and smooth back her blonde hair and they can be William and Buffy instead of Spike and Summers, vampire and Slayer. His idea of perfection is just being with her, close enough to inhale her scent, not fighting or kissing or screwing or talking or anything. Just existing. Just _being_, side by side.

He is an incurable fool, after all. How could he have ever thought she would let him in her heart? After all, he's a monster- oh, yes, he's a creature of the night, and everyone knows that they can't feel, they can't hurt, they can't _love_. Everyone knows that without a soul he's an emotionless shell for a demon (funny, Buffy never got into that with that Anya chit or Clem; only with Spike and only ever with Spike, like it was an excuse more than a reality). He knows it's only lies, but sometimes when he's with her he can't help but wish he _couldn't_ feel. That way, he wouldn't be going insane just from being so agonizingly close to her, and he wouldn't have to feel so hopeless every time she was done winding him around her deceptively tiny finger. She's all around him, clouding his vision and clogging up his mind (drowning, he thinks, has always thought). He's no stranger to love, especially not the unrequited sort. That much is familiar to him, from the days of bloody awful poetry through mass murder and straight on to his cringing existence on the fringes of the Slayer's pep squad. He has always been a man of extremes. What he feels is real and powerful. It consumes everything- there is no medium for him, no gray or apathy. His emotions are raw and fervent, a fever exploding inside, terrifying and uncontrollable but _real_, which is what she refuses to understand. This is why he can love and hate at the same time, with such ardency. And it's all _her_. Drusilla used to speak about her dancing around in his head, and there she was- distracting, so distracting, he can't think when she's spinning like that, always just beyond reach. She becomes everything, the source of his sorry being.

But she's worth all the pain, he thinks. Her every expression and movement, when they aren't driving each other insane, is so endearing and so perfectly characteristic of her. Like that one time, when she was sitting with him in his crypt drinking all of his alcohol, and while she gagged at every taste he could feel himself becoming more and more smitten with the girl, somehow _more_ devoted to her. And that adoration lasts forever, even when she pounds him into one bruised, bloody, broken pulp. He hates and loves her, so he can very well understand how she can still be sickened with him yet come to him for comfort when the daylight becomes too harsh and she needs a sample of the dark.

For she _is_ a creature of the dark, like he is, and until she accepts it they can never truly be. She carries so much light with her, letting it rip her apart because she denies what she is, and it tears through him just the same. The taste of her lips is fire, and he burns so that she can have her moment to feel. She's like kissing sunlight, the most wonderful thing in the world but also the most deadly. And yet he'll go on, until one or both of them is ash, because he needs her, wants her. He's addicted to her; he can't let go of her…

And damn him if he feels nothing for her, damn him if he doesn't hate her and worship her and feel with all the passion in the world for her. He will burn and ache and die and walk through hell a million times over, because (and here's the real laugh) he honestly, truly, sincerely loves her.

That's the only thing that matters.


End file.
